On two Thursdays this month we present new prints of four Budd Boetticher Westerns with Randolph Scott. "The Westerns of the sixties and seventies owe more to Budd Boetticher than Ford. (Boetticher's films) have the tensions of Spaghetti Westerns (without the iciness). (They) are the final great achievement of the traditional Western, before the explosion of the genre. Boetticher's seven modest Westerns starring Randolph Scott, released between 1956 and 1960, are rivaled in unpretentious moral complexity only by Anthony Mann's better-known series with James Stewart. Scott (is) generally presented by Boetticher as a loner not by principle or habit but by an obscure terror in his past (often a wife murdered). Thus he's not the asexual cowpoke so much as one who, temporarily at least, is beyond fears and yearnings. The typical Boetticher landscape-smooth, rounded, and yet impassible boulders-matches Scott's deceptively complex character." -Scott Simmon, combined and condensed from his essay on Boetticher in International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers and PFA notes In Comanche Station, Scott leads a group through Indian territory to bring back a settler's wife who has been captured by Comanches. Buchanan Rides Alone, the most consistently comic of the Boetticher/Scott Westerns, underscores Jim Kitses' (Horizons West) observation that "Boetticher's movies exist as parodies of the morality play." Loner Scott, passing through a corrupt frontier border town, leaves the community little better than when he rode in. Buchanan Rides Alone: Written by Charles Lang, from the novel The Name's Buchanan, by Jonas Ward. Photographed by Lucien Ballard. With Randolph Scott, Craig Stevens, Barry Kelley, Tol Avery. (77 mins). (Both Color, 35mm, Courtesy Columbia Repertory)